Creative People Must Be Stopped (10 page)

Not Sharing or Documenting Insights

I often see innovation teams using spaces that, though pleasant, don't allow the capture of a variety of types of data and insights. Large windows are nice, but they don't let you display text, images, reports, or the resulting insights that they generate in the team. Even the physical position of documents can relay information—for example, by arranging them in sequence or priority order. Ideally the information being discussed can be displayed in a place that everyone can see, in a way that everyone can access it, and in a mode that best expresses that idea.

Understanding, comparison, collaboration, debate, and decision making in a group might be far better supported with a few pictures ripped from a magazine and taped to the wall, as opposed to a detailed thousand-word email that no one bothered to read before the meeting. And once you ask them to kindly pull out their BlackBerry to read the email, the meeting is doomed.

Overcoming Environment Constraints

Groups need a space where members can interact, and the places they choose will affect their interactions. Instead of letting facilities planners or geographic convenience dictate the nature of your interactions, choose and modify your space carefully to support innovation.

Reconfigure the Group's Working Space

The goal in claiming a space should be to create an environment that facilitates the behaviors dictated by the current stage of the innovation process. At times group members may be working primarily alone, and at other times together. At times the group's findings will be collected in the form of survey responses on a computer printout, and at other times they may take the form of hundreds of Post-its on whiteboards.

The most radical versions of effective high-end innovation spaces that I have used are those that are designed for creative interaction by MG Taylor Corporation. The tables come in a variety of nesting shapes and sizes and are deployed based on the group size, task, and need for interaction. When they are not being used, they break down and can be put into a closet. Rolling bookshelves are ubiquitous, as are power outlets and network connections. If a team needs them, large LCD screens can be rolled to the place where groups are working. Everything is on wheels—even the six-foot-tall whiteboard walls—and it all looks inspiring.

However, I have also seen less expensive approaches that were equally effective. Starting with nothing more than a large bare room, some simple tables and chairs on wheels, some movable screens and partitions, and a set of portable whiteboards or easel pads, a number of start-ups, arts organizations, and corporations have easily and inexpensively gained the flexibility they needed to accommodate different phases of work by their teams. For some of them, all it took was a trip to IKEA, the Swedish furniture store, and an Allen wrench to assemble it all.

One expense I would not spare, however, is for porcelain-on-metal magnetic whiteboards; they are expensive, but worth it. You can not only write on them but also use an ever-widening variety of magnetic pins, clips, and even shelves to display articles, charts, photos, and the like. Especially in the early data-gathering phases of a project, just the ability to stand together and look at all the materials the team has collected will be worth the price.

Facilitate Multiple Modes of Expression

Just as innovation demands multiple ideas and problem-solving strategies, it also demands a variety of means for expressing ideas and sharing information. Consider developing a group norm that requires using multiple modes of expression, and then provide the appropriate space and tools. If you get a chance to tour a truly effective “innovation space,” you will note that it provides for multiple communication modes. You will see affordances for creating and sharing electronically created slides, photos, charts, and graphs. The space will also enable collaboration on whiteboards and easel pads, and will support the display and storage of physical models, all in the service of communicating ideas. Ready means for videotaping the proceedings are also likely to be built in and require little or no effort on the part of group members to operate.

Providing the means for visual expression is especially useful. I routinely bring a ream (one package of five hundred sheets) of white copy paper to meetings where ideation is going to happen. When people begin grasping for words to express their nascent ideas, I feed them paper and ask them to show me in drawings, diagrams, sketches, or any other way they can what it is they mean. Even if they simply start writing words on the paper, taking pen in hand can often help them get past the mental logjam.

Similarly, providing ample whiteboard space, flip charts, paper of different sizes, and other tools for visual expression can work wonders. Some brainstorming exercises, for example, benefit from forcing people to express an idea concisely on paper the size of a large Post-it. In other cases, a group might want huge sheets of butcher paper for listing or drawing ideas. Making sure everyone has a pen or marker in hand as the meeting starts and has ready access to a variety of writing surfaces will facilitate expression and communication of ideas.

Automate Documentation

Beyond having a place to interact, groups need a place to document their ongoing work. In this age of broadband, I find it astounding that so many groups do not take advantage of online collaboration tools, many of them free, to communicate about and document their work. Often I hear reasons like “the IT guys are worried about security” or “the company won't let us get access from home.” Security is a real concern, but isn't solving this kind of problem what IT people get paid to do?

At a large R&D lab I studied in the early 1990s, even before the Web existed, teams used USENET groups (the equivalent of today's group mailing lists) for all their communications, even interpersonal ones, that had any potential relevance to the project. Agendas, minutes, questions, decisions, and timelines were all copied to the list. This allowed members to reference them as needed, and also provided a way to easily record the development of intellectual property, because the progression of ideas could be traced back in time by source. Today groups have access to many useful online tools for these purposes, such as dedicated Web sites, shared documents, and wikis (collections of documents any of the members can edit or comment on, similar to Wikipedia).

Another simple tool for documenting the group's work is to use digital cameras to collect visual materials, such as pictures of drawings, prototypes, and whiteboards. These days, with a digital camera that has built-in Wi-Fi, groups won't even have to remember to transfer the photo files. Instead, pictures can be transmitted to a server or Web site automatically and immediately.

Process Constraints: Directing Members' Behavior

The last group-level constraint I'll consider is that of the
process
through which a group does its work. Most groups do not use formal innovation processes at all, and when they do, they rarely consider the constraints inherent in the process. This forms the basis of a significant constraint: the lack of process in a group. Without an established and accepted process, members will tend to do what comes naturally. Unfortunately, what is natural for me may not be what's natural for you, and this sets up the group for unnecessary conflict. As discussed earlier in this chapter, this conflict will result in members' addressing the social and emotional issues in the group rather than focusing on the information processing that must occur if the innovation challenge is to be solved.

Although some organizations have formal processes in place, groups are often unaware of the constraints inherent in using these processes. For example, continuous improvement processes (e.g., the Six-Sigma approach) may be ideal for incremental improvements, but are generally unsuited for the pursuit of radical innovations. Or perhaps the formal, tried-and-true process worked for the last problem, but this problem may be completely different. And when the process doesn't work (or even make sense to the members), they lose trust in the process and revert back to the natural behaviors that characterize a lack of process.

When groups have a process and it is the right one for the task, they may still have difficulty managing the phase transitions as the project moves from one stage to the next. To the extent that different phases call for different behaviors by members, a lack of consensus about which phase the group is in leads to a loss of effectiveness as members work at cross-purposes. So although the innovation process may seem simple—just establish and follow the steps—there are a number of dynamics in play that can make the process anything but straightforward.

The Seven Phases of an Innovation Process

Figure 3.3
depicts the seven basic phases of a purposeful innovation process. Although the nomenclature may differ among the many books that discuss group creative processes, the basic steps they depict are the same. As we're about to see, a key point illustrated in the diagram is that an innovation process requires group members to enact completely different behaviors in different phases of their work.

Figure 3.3

Phase 0, Identify Problem, requires someone to identify and articulate the problem the team is to solve. It gets the number zero because it is of such fundamental importance, though it doesn't often get a lot of careful attention, as groups want to move quickly into the next phase. A group may develop its own mission, or the problem may be assigned from outside the group.

Phase 1, Generate Ideas, requires
divergent
behavior from the members, which simply means that they have to think as differently as possible from each other, with the goal of coming up with the widest variety of possible solution ideas. This generates the primary space of potential solutions for the team.

Phase 2, Assess Constraints, requires
convergent
behavior from the group as it critically examines the ideas alone and in combinations to determine those that might have a chance of actually working in the intended context. The goal for this phase is to develop a set of solution concepts that have a chance of solving the problem, along with an understanding of the different constraints that each of the particular approaches would face.

Phase 3, Set Direction, is the peak of convergence, where the team makes a commitment to the direction it has chosen. This is also a time when teams seek external opinion about the wisdom of their choice.

Phase 4, Design, is another
divergent
phase, during which the team has to generate ideas for overcoming the constraints that stand in the way of the implementation of the concept. If immovable constraints cannot be overcome at this point, the problem may need to be reformulated, or it is considered unsolvable and the project stopped.

Phase 5, Refine, is again a
convergent
phase in which the group molds its solution into a form that will work in its context. Groups can sometimes iterate between phase 4 and phase 5. If they are successful, they will become aligned and ready to move into phase 6; if not, they may need to go back to the start.

Phase 6, Implement, is the phase in which the group enters what might best be called the “Pizza and Red Bull” phase. Here the team hunkers down, avoids any new input (lest it become subject to “feature creep”), and works to get the project done.

Overcoming Process Constraints

As we have just seen, the innovation process involves significant transitions in the way the group goes about its work. Even if the group understands that different phases of the process demand quite different kinds of behavior—and many groups do not—the social forces operating on groups tend to be much more powerful than reason. I'll point out some adverse dynamics that can occur as I've observed them in teams in a variety of industries, as well as ways to overcome them. As an example, I'll use the story from the start of this chapter about Josephine, the executive director of ShowArts who was asked by her board to undertake project Think Big aimed at attracting a larger and more diverse audience. The lettered paragraphs here correspond to the labels in
Figure 3.4
.

Figure 3.4